A Blog About Food & So Much More

I fulfilled a bucket list entry…at a hospital

Last week I spent 3 days in Los Angeles for a job interview. My final afternoon with the group, one of my potential co-workers took me to lunch in the hospital cafeteria.

Those of you who know me well know I despise hospital food.

I spent a week in the hospital when I was 16 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Though the food at my hospital was less than appealing in general, my condition probably exacerbated my aversion. Two surgeries meant fasting, but even once they were over and I was cleared to eat solid food again, the lingering effects of anesthesia made me feel gross. Then there were the painkillers. The morphine made me miserable. Yes, I was in pain. But I was hungry, and the morphine made me too nauseous to eat. It didn’t take long for me to tell the nurses to nix my drip and just load me up on extra strength Tylenol. When I finally felt like eating, well…

I know this may sound odd, but I fondly recall having several of my friends visiting when my dinner arrived after a few nights in the hospital. I lifted the lid off my plate, caught a whiff of what was supposed to be pork loin, and immediately slammed the lid back down. We still laugh about it now. It is not much of an exaggeration to say the only thing I ate from the cafeteria was soft-serve and bread. I subsisted almost entirely off the gifts of food visitors brought me…take out from the Olive Garden, cupcakes, and fruit immediately come to mind.

In the coming months, I almost always brought my own snack with me to the clinic during chemo treatments. Just the smell of hospital food made me gag. It still does; getting trapped in an elevator from which a food cart has just departed is one of my least favorite hospital experiences (God forbid the food cart actually be in there with me). My chemo actually made me more tired than nauseous; in fact, the prednisone I was also on made me ravenously hungry. All the time. But the few times I attempted to eat cafeteria food during treatments were less than successful. I recall making my mom go get a second helping of chili for me one afternoon, only to open the lid and feel like tossing my cookies. I also remember ordering a Caesar salad on the way home once with similar results. It took me years to give Caesar dressing another shot.

Anyways, the point of all of that was to give you an idea of how shocked I was to be agreeing to eat at a hospital cafeteria. I mean, I’ve spent A LOT of the past two years in hospitals, and I’ll spend A LOT of the rest of my life in them. But if I got so hungry I needed to eat there? It was a sandwich and Craisins every time. No lie. Now I found myself actually excited to be eating an entree at a hospital, and you know why? Because said entree was fish tacos! I would get to check something off my bucket list without even trying! And, I was assured these were delicious (and the only reason to ever eat at the cafeteria, haha).

They were fabulous. This version was made with breaded fish, though most of the recipes I’ve seen call for unbreaded. There were about five different salsas and sauces you could add to your heaps of freshly chopped fish and slaw; I opted for the creamy Baja sauce made with cilantro. Everything about these was amazing, with one small exception. The flour tortillas they were made in were slightly gross. Holly will remember a package her mom bought us a few months ago that we used to make green chili but found oddly textured on their own. This HAD to be the same brand. They were almost rubbery, not at all what your typical tortilla should taste like. But not nearly gross enough to prevent me from eating the entire plate of tacos 😉

Conclusion: fish tacos are phenomenal. I’m sure there are some restaurants serving up gross versions out there. I’m sure certain sauces or toppings are better than others. But in general, it’s safe to say that this is a dish I’ll be eating forever and ever 🙂